All I ever asked of a screen is a few hours somewhere else. Hollywood keeps following me out.

Two weekends ago I started Sterling Point, Amazon’s new drama that your group chat has already found if your group chat is any good, and I did what I always do with a show I love: abandoned my responsibilities and disappeared into it. Binging is my meditation practice. I dissociate into fictional people’s problems until mine look manageable.

The lead is Annie Jacobson—smart, self-sabotaging, played by Ella Rubin—but the best thing in the show is her twin brother, Connor. For the twins’ eighteenth birthday—his, he clarifies, since they are “only fraternal twins”—Connor throws a party themed to Camp Rock 2. Not Camp Rock. Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam. “It can’t be Camp Rock 1.” There are Jonas Brothers balloons. There is a cardboard cutout of Alyson Stoner—admissible under the theme, since she appears in both films—wishing Connor, and only Connor, a happy birthday. Annie’s name makes the cake on conditions: under his, smaller, and in parentheses. There is a rule, announced to his own guests, that “It is not ‘This Is Me’ era”—the first movie’s big duet, banned outright. A man who has done the reading and reached a holding. I loved him the way you love a fictional person at one in the morning, which is to say completely.

Somewhere in episode five I looked up the actor mid-scene, because I am a millennial with a phone. His name is Keen Ruffalo. He is twenty-five, he is wonderful, and he is Mark Ruffalo’s son.

I put the phone down. Connor was gone. In his place stood an actor with his father’s eyebrows, and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)